labcats | Playing in your own larp

At DexCon, all of the members of Straightjackets Optional took a role in Hot Tub 2 to make the game viable. This felt a little weird.

In the first Hot Tub game, Josh, Stephen, and I have taken roles in the past. I have played a character who provides opposition to other characters, playing the role not dissimilarly to how I played an NPC in Colonel Sebastian T. Rawhide's Circus of the Spectacular. I'm there to make trouble, to give people something to push against, maneuver around, or, possibly, recruit. Josh and Stephen have played characters that work better as NPCs to begin with, and Stephen has also played a character who works fine as a regular character, but who also works fine as a gm-run character adding to the atmosphere of the game.

In the second Hot Tub game, Stephen played a character who worrks fine as an NPC. Josh, Beth, and I played, at varying points, three PCs involved in a love triangle. This was really weird, though not for the reasons a non-larper might think. It was weird because, when my character found out that Josh's character was choosing her rival, I wasn't sure what the correct reaction would be. I knew all too clearly how much was at stake and how my character's decision of how to react could affect the entire game. I did not want to push the game too far in one direction, knowing what I knew, but I wasn't sure that going the other way wasn't pushing too far in a different direction. Josh said afterwards that I'd been fine.

My priority here and in Hot Tub 1 was to play the character as a facilitator for the "real" players' fun. To a degree, when I larp, I want to make choices that increase the overall fun level, not just mine, but it is odd doing it as a gm, when I can see the machinery.

I know that there are people who have played and run certain larps multiple times. I wonder how it feels.